Nina Beier Rocky

In her first solo exhibition in Switzerland at Kunsthaus Glarus, the artist presents a combination of new and existing works. Two floor works hint at the contested realms of global currency exchange, renegotiating time and labour’s relationship to value systems. With Minutes (2013), genuine hair wigs from India or China collide with handmade, oriental rug samples (wagirehs) pressed under glass. Traditional handcraft meets degrading trade, where the body itself becomes a commodity. With Greens (2013), indoor plants are dried and pressed under glass on beach towels featuring various currency designs. Here symbols of economic and ecological growth are superimposed. Animal shells frame a new work, titled Wallets (2014), in which the enduring body armours and dwellings of different species are stuffed with a variety of soft, industrial materials. The subject of permanence appears again in ceramic tiles, titled Tileables (2014) which, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to carry prints of digital renderings of stone textures. These are borrowed from 3D programs to build temporary visions of architectural constructions. Imitations of mass-produced marble, shale stone and plasterwork, play on realitiy and fiction and the obvious representation that is taking place. A framed series with the title Sweat no Sweat no Sweat no Sweat no Sweat (2013) presents various zoomed in details of the film character Rocky Balboa’s torso with a sweatshirt featuring an artificial patch of sweat. Here, in turn, the human body and its otherwise fleeting secretions are created as image, questioning the very achievability of capturing the human condition. In the exhibition, a wide range of materials, representational and temporal concepts are situated in relationship to one another. Hard and soft, living and dead material, authentic object and image, but also constancy and impermanence, art history and the digital age encounter one another in various constellations.